Dear sir or madam,

we regret to inform you that your application for the position as a crematory operator has been rejected for the following reasons:

1) You don't have any education, which may not be the main issue, but it is certainly a problem as we don't know if you can read, communicate or any other of the basic skills besides writing.

2) According to your previous workplace, you used to send out regular ash, not the people's. You also used to forget that you were cremating a body.

3) Your reason for sending this application for the job was "Because I like to burn people" which didn't quite settle with us.

Of course, there were many more, these are only the three main reasons. We hope that you will not be discouraged by this letter.

Wishing the best,

The ''Cross In Eyes'' Crematorium

the issue is that i am obsessed with something i cannot have, and will never. i chase after this intangible, unqualifiable thing, in hopes that somehow i will learn to pack it up and weigh it on a bathroom scale and be satisfied, even though i know i will question every element, every comma, every single breath of the system and every infallible detail; it's too pale, too deep, too strong, too cracked, too broken.

the cruel truth is that i will never write exactly what i mean, never tell the story quite how i mean to, never share these experiences that i treasure so dearly and strive to immortalize.

it's impossible to write the pinnacle of right now.

and yet, we pursue. we pursue, and we write.

She is not of this universe, never acting like the rest. A wild card she is and will never apologize for being that way. Her reflection is pure - her mind is hungry. When she smiles, she lifts the clouds on rainy days. A revelation of love and chaos. She is not an option - being okay with being alone. Someone once mistook her love for a temporary affair, now her dreams and ambitions keep her warm at night.

Get your stinking hands of me, you damn dirty human! Why are you always clinging to me with your sweaty palms? Those nasty hands of yours are covered in something sticky and greasy, probably the remnants of the office donuts you just slammed into you gaping maw.

Do you even wash your hands before you touch me? Please get some Lysol and wipe me off, there is a residue building on my ebony surface and I don't know what it is.

Those fat fingers of yours can't help clicking my buttons and flicking my wheel. You don't even ask my permission! Would it kill you to buy me a new battery before you get all up in my business? Or at least get a cue tip and clean out my light hole. There's more crumbs in there than on the front of your short sleeve button down and overly short tie. Be gentle, I'm delicate.

Please, for fuck's sake, don't spill that hot coffee on me. Take it out on the keyboard next door. No one likes that asshat.

Another thing, you drag me and pull me across the rough surface of you desk. No pad and no considerations these days! Logi in the cube next door gets a pad! He also doesn't get slammed around when something takes to long to load or crashes. It's not my damn fault, so take it easy, asshole!

One more thing, I have a delicate, and probably overly Freudian, connection with the mother board. I don't know who my father was, so don't come between me and my mother board! Leaver her running or else my lights will go out and you can't click jack!

~The Mouse

P.S. Get some sun, your pale ass face is scaring me.

I remember the first time I saw a purple rose. Not a pink rose made to drink blue dye but a rose inbred by tweezers - the purplest rose with the purplest rose over and over - until one grew into the actual hue so popular for weddings in the 1990s.

The problem that always seems to come up with selective breeding is when accentuating the exaggerated feature sought after there comes accentuated downsides. Like those teeny dogs desperate girls bought to carry around in their purses, teacup chihuahuas as an example died after an average of 3 years compared to 15 years for an average size pup. Ashkenazi Jews, over thousands of year choosing to be fruitful and multiply with only their own, have created 19 genetic conditions which 1 out of 4 having those genetic roots can pass to other generations, observant or not.

I had a personal journey into the results of selective breeding that took a trip to a small village in Hungary at the age of 67 to find the truth. As a child, things happened within my father's two brother's and one sisters that I took as normal until I was eight.

I knew one of my uncle's lived in a sanitarium, as they were called then, but had no real concept of what that meant. I never met him until my other uncle's funeral. That uncle shot himself in the basement of his house in Chicago just a couple of weeks after he had sat on the floor with my brother and I recording our voices on his new wire recorder.

In the second grade "Show and Tell" was a big thing so I was excited to tell about our trip.

When my teacher stopped me in the middle of my presentation in horror and then called my father who had to come from work to take me home to spank me that I knew things in his family were not to be told.

It took decades after to really understand. My aunt called to ask if I wanted some of my grandfather's things. I drove to St. Paul, having not seen her since my grandmother died 30 years before. She was a wonder at 78 with long henna hair in a house smelling of patchouli that had once been a midcentury marvel now filled with paintings, sculptures, books, boxes and more boxes hoarded in stacks pouring over, leaning, falling down nearly covering her Persian rugged floors. She held me too tight, speaking non-stop explaining her whole messed up once glorious world. She kept me there two days, though I tried to leave, wanting to tell me everything, allowing me to take nothing.

And years later, after she died encased in her own madness for nearly 12 years, when her son called to ask me to help bury her in her husband's family plot along with the ashes of his brother, my cousin who had killed himself in the 1980s a drug overdose with the needle in his penis when identified, one's he'd come across going through those many many boxes.

And I did in a cemetery in Chicago acting as a lay speaker to no one even though the funeral home had set up white folding chairs on fake grass Good Friday 2013.

But I digress...

It came to me while doing a family tree on Ancestry that out of the four children in my father's family and their six children there were three suicides and five diagnosed with manic depression. The one cousin had a boy child named Sean born maimed with no feelings of pain. He could not cry, face twisted. Eyelids sewed partially shut at the corners. Tongue always out, dry and cracked. He never walked without braces. The first and the last great grandchild.

It all seemed like more than a coincidence. So I really began searching back, not to my extremely lucid grandfather who lived to be 103 born on the Danube in what is now Croatia from parents fleeing Bulgaria, but to the grandmother who died when I was only 9 and who I remembered as cranky and stout with white hair she'd let down to the floor and brush each night speaking some language to herself when grandpa would cuss and tell her to speak English around us kids. I one I look most like which each passing day.

Those locks and those of 3 of her children used to be what was called back then strawberry blond...like me, my aunt, my uncles, five of my cousins and Sean. Shared genetics.

Her story printed up in the local Bemidji paper when they interviewed my grandfather on his one hundred birthday. A wild one married to a master saddle maker in Budapest. Leaving him to be a house maid - part prostitute/part their - in New York in 1902. Deported on the same Cunnard steam ship my grandfather choose to return to his parents, one year richer for having contacted himself to an Ohio foundry as his father had before him. Singing folk songs through cabin walls. Taking his name and living with his parents as he returned to work 10 months for the $110 dollar to bring her back to America.

Grandfather Eastern Catholic but my grandmother clung to her Evangelical Lutheran faith, all four of her children baptized but never churched. I traced her family back from those old church records copied and kept by the LDS on microfiche. I sat in a library for hours reading those from ink staind entries of the Evangelical Lutheran congregation of Nagyborzony going back to when they came to that place as a group in the 1700s.

More research. The Borzsony mountain rich in gold, silver, and nickel at the time.

The King of Hungary hiring professional miners, entire self-contained crews from Bavaria, to come from Germany to work and live digging. They brought their families, their religion and their language choosing maintain the purity of their identity in a foreign land to have when they returned back home. Chorea killed so many. The families had many children. Buried many children. The families married only their own within their church.

In 1796, the King of Hungary decreed those not of Hungarian blood had to take new two syllable surnames that told of their profession. The law intended for Jews but this clan of Danube Swaian also complied and Gos became Goldschnickel. I always wondered about such an ugly name until the night my aunt told me never to forget Gold/Nickel. The long name beginning with a G made my forage through all the Hungarian so much easier.

Now it made sense and the records continued scanning to my grandfather Janos born 1842 whose first wive and first son died and then my great grandmother Rosa from Germany came with her parents and they had a new Janos and three Rosas before one lived and my grandmother and another two sons. And the records from the church shrunk as the families just a few to begin with had intermarried and intermarried and intermarried until they were all just one genetic thread pure in the way they had chosen, much like the purple rose.

When my mother died, I took the trip to just to see it with my own eyes the mountains from which you now could see the country of Slovakia. Writing ahead to secure a room, I was told family still existed. A cousin was now the village mayor. When we met, I knew the stout man with strawberry blond hair and deformities needing a cane to walk since birth. as he walked toward us from a distance. His smile twisted. Tongue partially out, dry and cracked, as he embraced me too hard. Not wanting to let me go though I tried.

He showed me with pride the family home with its many extensions back into the surrounding woods. Almost 250 years accommodating first growing then shrinking family units. Then a stone bridge over a flowing creek. that lead to the miner's train. A tourist attraction now. Painted bright green. The tunnels stripped bare before 1990. The church, one of five in the village, with a huge plaque for those ethnic Germans who were first drafted by Germany in the great wars and after taken to Russian camps never to return. So odd to see the name Goldschnikel etched in faded gold.

He had a daughter, a pretty blond girl from the small snap shot in his wallet, he was raising on his own. Teaching her the old ways. He brought a satchel filled with papers, photos, maps spilling out as he sat on the floor with me speaking so quickly often forgetting and lapsing into that language only a handful yet understood. He was quite not right in a way I also found familiar, holding on wanting to tell me everything. As if I could ever forget.

So eugenics? Probably man is not best at picking which features and values to accentuate for those who have to live, or chose not to, in the lifetimes beyond the benefits selected.

A big enough Sky! It is new because it has not been used to it's full capacity. It solves the acrimonious relationship of the world, the inconsistencies, and the weaknesses.

Every investor wants profit long term. When there exists competition away from the reality of a big enough Sky for everyone to ride on, that long term goal gets shortlived. Often, we forget that, that's really the biggest innovation there is. I created something to serve a purpose, you figured out a way to make what I created work faster. Why can't we have a collaborative work, get an investor, and both fly. Investors continue to yield profit yearly, there is harmonious relationship, and more innovations are birthed. It's simply logic at the most basic level.

My therapist tells me that my brain is different than most people's. She says that it sees things differently, bigger. But bigger isn't always better.

Most of the obstacles in my life come from my brain. Seeing the bigger picture, seeing what everyone's thinking (even if it's not real), seeing words and phrases all in my own imagination. I'm afraid of most things and most things produce melancholy for me. That's why I take psychiatric medications.

Recently when I've been lost in thought, hating the way I think, the way my brain works, I daydream, vividly, about reaching into my skull with clawlike fingers and removing the brain. I suppose the brain isn't actually pink like in most picture books. But I'll imagine it is in the daydream, and it's stained with blood. Then I'll set the brain, my brain, on the table and point a gun at it (which makes no sense, I'm too chicken to hold a gun), and shoot it. BANG. Because I don't want it. I don't want this brain.

It holds too much. Too, too much.

The medication helps me overcome it. My therapist helps me overcome it. But it seems to be a much harder journey than I anticipated. An uphill struggle. Perhaps success will come. Perhaps someday I'll measure my success by overcoming the mountainous obstacle that my brain seems to be (really, it's only three pounds or something, but it seems so much larger now). And if that day comes, until that day comes (I have to be positive-- my therapist says so), I'll keep breathing and lightening the load on my brain. Till the day where I don't believe I have to shoot it to relieve the pressure.

She used to be a lot of things, they would tell her. But one thing she has remained, is true to herself; mountains of everything beautiful ~ sacred. The universe spins around to take notice, when she walks. A healing power. They ask her her secret and she explains how an abused soul - a tortured soul found light in the darkness of it all. The locks remain on all her windows now, yet, every once in a while she opens them to air out all the stars she holds and keeps safe at night. Who points to the lost and calls them home. There's no sense in trying to understand her next move, just let her roam free with the brave ones who don't believe in limits.

If it is toxic it isn't love

if it is love it would lay down its life rather than be toxic.

People want lots of types of relationships to be love

because if they are called love

there must be goodness

worth suffering for

when too often

they feel they are getting what they deserve

thinking so little of their own worth

they've come to believe

that

very harmful unpleasant pervasive insidious interconnections

better than going it alone.

It isn't.

Disengaging alone will raise your self-esteem.

Aim higher.

Your deserve better.

I am depression.

Always there

waiting

for you to let me in

and then take you over

paralyzing your logic optimism faith

those defenses

to overcome me.

Give me a minute

and I'll devour your mind.